


Puppy Love

by DreamsOfSleep



Category: New Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Day At The Beach, F/M, New Girl Secret Santa 2018, Summer Romance, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-09-17 18:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16979301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsOfSleep/pseuds/DreamsOfSleep
Summary: When Nick was sixteen, he fell in love with the prettiest girl on the whole beach.





	1. Butterfly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yogicturtle](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=yogicturtle).



This was Jess’s first summer being a real teenager.

Cece had developed early and had seemingly gotten all the confidence to go along with it overnight, but at sixteen, Jess was a late bloomer, still uncomfortable in her newfound teenage body. It seemed like one day all the other girls had just grown up and left her behind while she had spent afternoons in her room reading _Jane Eyre_ and helping her mother in the community garden. 

Jess had never been the rebellious type, but lately, she felt the urge to break out of the mold of who everyone expected her to be. She wanted to stop feeling like such a little kid all the time, to become the daring heroine in the story of her own life, instead of always being on the sidelines and only reading about them.

She was sixteen now and that was practically a grown-up. Yes, she decided, this was the summer everything was going to change for her. She even let Cece pick out a new bikini for her: an attention-getting red number with a ribbon halter top and cute white polka-dots. It felt much too ridiculously bold and brazen for her, but she had promised Cece she would wear it to the beach and not chicken out and bring her old ratty one-piece to change into once they were there. 

“We’re going to find you somebody to have a summer fling with, Jess,” Cece declared. “You need to live dangerously just once.”

She was trying to be a bit more adventurous, but she wasn’t sure she was someone that could “live dangerously” like Cece. She had always been too much of a rule follower and maybe that habit was too hard to break. Other teenagers seemed to relish the freedom that came along with their first rites of passage: first time sneaking out of the house to go to a party, first sips of a too warm drink pilfered from their parents’ liquor cabinets, first time flirting and making out hidden from the oversight of critical, overbearing adults. But Jess was too afraid of everything, had been ever since she was a little kid, and she could only feel the familiar anxiety in the pit of her stomach at the thought of doing all of those seemingly adult things. She thinks this is the reason she had always been an outcast, never got invited to any crazy high school parties, never dated and hadn’t even been kissed by a boy yet. At the same time she wanted to experience all of those things, it felt so much easier just to hide within the safety of the bookish nerd she had always been. But Cece was her best friend and Jess was trying to trust her best friend’s voice over the voice she heard inside her head that wanted to pick apart everything about herself whenever she looked in the mirror. 

\---

Jess is sitting on the beach next to Cece’s popular friends trying to flirt with the boys like Cece taught her, but she feels terribly out of place, gangly and awkward. She’s a newborn calf with weird alien eyes walking among the sleek gazelles, attractive to exactly no one. Cece made it look so easy. She had those gorgeous model looks, but more than that, she had the confidence to pull them off. Cece was just so cool and interesting that of course she would have all the boys tripping all over themselves to be near her, hanging on to her every word. Jess would have liked to have half of Cece’s confidence, but she couldn’t help remembering that these were the same boys who used to make fun of her for being a shy, bookish nerd in grade school. She was always left with the sense that something bad would happen even if they were nice to her, like that scene in _Carrie_ before they spill the pig’s blood.

\---

The group makes plans to head into the nearby amusement park to ride the Ferris Wheel and play games on the midway. Cece tries to make her feel included, but it makes Jess feel beyond pathetic to continue tagging along as the fifth wheel amid the rest of Cece’s popular friends. She begs off from the group so she can stay on the beach and read her book instead. It probably makes her extra lame, but she can’t help breathing a sigh of relief to be left alone instead of having to continue pretending to be one of the cool kids like she has been all morning.

She was really all talk, wasn’t she? She had built up this beach trip for weeks in her head only to revert back to who she has always been after a few short hours. The adults in her life are always telling her comforting things about how everyone has an awkward phase. They tell her stories of all the smart nerdy girls that blossom in college and how there will be plenty of time for boys and dating later, but right now living through it, the time from now to then seems interminable and endless. History belongs to the victors after all. History doesn’t look kindly on the failures, washes away all the stories of the ugly ducklings that never turn into swans. Nobody wants to admit that some people just stay ugly ducklings forever for one reason or another. 

Maybe she just has to face the fact that she’ll never be one of the cool girls. She’ll always be a little too weird, a little too awkward, a little too left of center. But it doesn’t stop her heart from wanting love—the kind of love that she’s been reading about in books her entire life. She knows people would make fun of her for believing in that kind of love, that they are the simple, naïve desires of a hopeless teenage girl who doesn’t understand love at all, but maybe growing up just makes you cynical to the kind of pure love that can exist in the world. Has anyone ever truly lived if they haven’t been swept up truly and romantically by love? And as she sits here on the beach on this perfect summer day lost within the pages of another great love story, she still holds on to that dream, as fragile and impossible as it is, that even if she couldn’t live that today, someday, maybe, it could still happen to her.


	2. Meet Cute

Schmidt had dragged him to the beach to gawk at pretty girls. He had just broken up with Caroline though, so he wasn’t much for noticing other pretty girls. Officially they had only been boyfriend and girlfriend for a year, but it felt much longer. A year was practically a lifetime. Schmidt kept rolling his eyes at him every time he said that, but it was true. 

“We need to find you a rebound, Nick. Forget about Caroline.”

That was awfully rich of Schmidt to say when he never even had a girlfriend, but Schmidt had started thinking of himself as a regular Casanova after his mom sent him away to that “self-improvement” camp and he lost all that weight. Schmidt’s kind of a douchebag now, but he was still Nick’s best friend and Nick knew he meant well in his own way. Hell, Schmidt even convinced his parents to take him on vacation to California with them because Schmidt thought the change in scenery would do him good. Spoiler alert: It didn’t. But he knows it made Schmidt feel bad that it didn’t and he couldn’t fix Nick’s life for him, so Nick let himself get dragged to the beach instead of spending all day in bed at their beach house listening to emo music and writing bad poetry about the heart that Caroline had ripped out of his chest with her perfect, perfect hands.

\---

To his credit, Schmidt did his level best all morning to try and talk him up to girls. It wasn’t Schmidt’s fault that he was such a shitty wingman when Nick could see what he was working with. It would have been hard to talk him up on the best of days, and this was far from that. Eventually Schmidt got distracted chasing some tall modelesque Indian chick and left him sitting by himself on their beach towels. Nick didn’t know whether to be thankful or annoyed by that. The world was so much simpler when they were kids and they had both been losers together, but the world was always moving on without him, and he couldn’t blame Schmidt for wanting to move on too. 

He was absentmindedly scanning the beach and thinking about whether he should just walk the five miles back to Schmidt’s beach house on foot when a figure caught his eye. It was a girl sitting alone on the beach reading, something completely mundane and ordinary, but for some reason he felt drawn to her. It was probably Schmidt’s influence really, Schmidt working his way into his brain by encouraging him to “just go up and talk to some girls” like that was a completely normal thing for him to do. He wasn’t usually the type of guy to go up to a girl unless he knew they were into him first (a sure thing), but he felt a compulsion to go up and talk to her, that it would ruin his whole day if he didn’t, so his feet were already taking him in her direction before his rational brain could catch up. 

He plopped himself unceremoniously down next to her on the sand and tried to think of a killer opening line, something that would make her think he was really cool and confident and not the sweaty, stumbling mess he actually was. All he had running through his head were the lame pickup lines Schmidt made him memorize. “Hi,” he finally settles on after an awkwardly long pause. 

She clearly didn’t want to be bothered because she just put her book up higher to cover her face and that made him feel like a real jerk. He would normally just leave her alone, but he was still left with that nagging feeling that made him come over to her in the first place. He put his hand out to get her to lower her book and their eyes met. 

She was very pretty, stunning actually, gorgeous like one of those classic Hollywood beauties in those old black and white movies, but that’s actually not the first thing he remembers about meeting her. 

_I know you._ That’s what he almost blurts out. That’s kind of insane though because he doesn’t actually know her. He’s never met her before. It’s just that feeling of déjà vu you get sometimes going to a place you’ve never been before. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but it’s _familiar._ This feels like the good kind of déjà vu though, like going home after a long time being away. That’s what takes his breath away the first time he meets her. 

“What’s your name?” he breathes out. He really needed to know that. It seemed like the most important thing in the world right now to learn that.

“Jess,” she said, still wary of him. She was far too nice to lie and give him a fake name like she probably should have. She didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe he was another mean boy that wanted to play a prank on her like when she was a kid, but it didn’t feel that way. He was giving her a look that she’d never seen on anybody’s face before, and it confused her. It was something akin to awe, but she didn’t know why he would be looking at her like that. 

“I’m Nick.” It’s good he can remember his own name because being near her made him feel tongue-tied and like he couldn’t remember anything else at the moment. 

“You want to help me build a sandcastle, Jess?” He cringes internally the second that falls out of his mouth. That was worse than any of Schmidt’s pickup lines. He doesn’t know why he said that since he hasn’t done that since he was five, but for whatever reason, she seems charmed. 

“Okay,” she says, smiling at him.


	3. Sandcastles

They end up building a pretty kick-ass sandcastle together. They make a good team: he builds the high sturdy walls and tall towers; she collects beach artifacts to decorate them and carves details into the damp sand to make it look like an actual castle—faux stone bricks and marble arches. They forget to account for the high tide line though, so most of it ends up getting washed out, but it’s tragic in a funny kind of way.

\---

Afterwards, they walk along the beach. They aren’t going anywhere in particular, just exploring the shore together. Jess starts rambling about all the science-y stuff she knows about the beach—about tides and sands and sea life—because she’s nervous and that seems better than silence. That usually scares people off, her being a know-it-all, but Nick seems engrossed, like he’s really interested in listening to her tell him about all that stuff. 

\---

Jess talks. She talks a lot, but Nick thinks she just has a lot of words because she’s really smart and can’t keep them all in her brain. He’s not really good at school, but she makes him wish he were just so he would have interesting things to talk to her about too. 

He’s glad that she doesn’t seem to mind hanging out with him. She laughs at his dumb jokes, and it makes him want to keep telling them to her just to hear it. He can tell it’s genuine and not just a fake laugh to humor him. He thinks he likes that about her, that she’s just really genuine and overly sincere about everything. 

He tries not to stare at her, just sneaks glances at her out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t know if it’s creepy that he wants to keep looking at her. She’s really pretty, but it’s not just that. He’s seen pretty girls before, but they didn’t make him want to look at them like she did, like he can’t stop looking at her. And every time she smiles at him, it makes him want to smile back at her because she’s the type of person that makes other people happy just by being around. He hasn’t even thought about Caroline in the few hours since he met her. It’s like he looked at Jess from across the beach and forgot about her. Does that make him a shitty person to forget his first ever real girlfriend just like that? Or was it Fate bringing him here today, telling him he had to go through that horrible break up with Caroline to reach Jess? He doesn’t really believe in Fate, but it sure feels like Fate today.

Nick musters up the courage to reach out and hold her hand. He hoped she couldn’t tell he was nervous. He pretended that it was just something he could do.

\---

Jess looks over at him in surprise. She’s pretty sure she’s blushing furiously, but luckily Nick isn’t looking right at her. She thinks he’s just doing that because she almost face-planted on the sand from tripping over her own feet a few short seconds ago. She hopes he can’t feel the rapid fluttering of her heartbeat through her palm. 

Jess stops talking after he reaches out to hold her hand, and he hopes he hasn’t made her uncomfortable by being too forward with her, but she doesn’t pull away from him. 

He looks back over at her. “Hey, you want to go get some ice cream, Jess?” he asks her. “My treat.” 

Her smile is shy, but she squeezes his hand in response. They walk to the boardwalk together holding hands. 


	4. Girl Talk

Their friends end up finding them at the picnic tables. Like all the other boys, Nick’s friend Schmidt seems particularly enamored with Cece. Jess would understand if Nick developed a crush on Cece too after meeting her, but although Nick is friendly enough to Cece, he still chooses to sit next to her and makes it seem like he wants to continue hanging out with her. Jess is grateful for that at least, even if it’s just Nick being a gentleman. 

\---

Nick gets up to get them sodas, and Cece pulls her aside to go to the bathroom so they can have the privacy for some girl talk. 

“I think he really likes you, Jess,” Cece says.

“Nick? No, he’s just being nice.” Jess doesn’t want to assume anything after only one day. He probably just thinks of her as a friend. 

“The way he looks at you? Boys don’t look at me that way, Jess.”

Jess is taken aback by that. “What do you mean?”

Cece fluffs her hair and applies more lip gloss in the mirror. “In my experience, boys usually want something from me. They like me because they think I’m hot, but I could be anyone, any other pretty girl. But the way Nick looks at you…it’s like he adores you.” 

Jess looks down at her feet. She traces the palm that Nick held a few short hours ago, wonders if it could be true. “What if I mess things up, Ceec?” she says in a small voice. He might find something out about who she really is and not like her so much anymore.

Cece hugs her. “Then he’s an idiot,” Cece says. “And he’s just another dumb boy.”

“But I want you to be brave, Jess. You’re so awesome, and I just want you to meet someone else who sees you the way I do.”

Jess sniffles into Cece’s shoulder. She feels a bit silly being emotional in a public bathroom like this, but Cece doesn’t seem to mind. 

“I should probably borrow some lip gloss then, shouldn’t I?” she says jokingly to lighten the mood.

Cece digs into her purse for the perfect color. “Of course, babe, that’s what best friends are for.”


	5. Alpha Dog

Due to the lunch rush, it takes Nick longer than he expected to make it back to Jess. By the time he gets back, some other guy is sitting in his seat talking to Jess. Nick hands Jess her soda, but he ends up having to take the far seat away from her. 

“Nick, this is Sam,” Jess introduces him. “He’s a lifeguard here.”

“Hey, dude.” Sam reaches out to shake his hand. Nick takes it reluctantly. He doesn’t know Sam, but he already know he doesn’t like him. 

Nick has to spend the next fifteen minutes listening to Sam talk about himself. _He’s the star quarterback at his school. He already has a fancy football scholarship, and he’s going to become a doctor. Scratch that, not just any doctor, a pediatrician because he loves kids. He likes dogs and driving his Corvette and he works as a lifeguard during the summer so he has an excuse to go surfing every day._ Sam is a perfect guy with a perfect life. It makes Nick sink down into his seat feeling like an ugly, disgusting troll next to Sam.

Sam sits a little too close to Jess. He’s too touchy-feely with her when he talks. Sam says something that makes Jess laugh, and that makes Nick want to drive a plastic spork into Sam’s eye. Nick knows Sam likes Jess too, and he’s going after her. 

Nick wants to tell Sam to back off because he saw her first, but he and Jess aren’t together so he knows he doesn’t have any right to do that, to tell Jess who she should talk to or who she should sit next to or hang out with or anything really. They had a nice time together building a sandcastle and eating ice cream on a sunny afternoon, but it didn’t mean anything. He’s a complete non-entity in her life. Hell, if he were a girl, he’d probably want to be with Sam too. Sam’s all tall and lifeguard-y and he knows that’s important to girls. Nick knows Sam is going to have a great life and that’s why people, why girls, want to be around him.

If it were anybody else, he’d probably just let her go. But it feels really important to keep Jess in his life. And Sam can probably have any girl he wants, but Nick just wants Jess, so he’ll fight harder to keep her. Nick knows guys like Sam. He’s been losing to guys like Sam his entire life. But just this once, he wants the universe to be on his side.

\---

Some of the popular boys organize a swimming contest. Guys like that think everything is a competition and always need to find ways to prove they’re better than everyone else. If Nick had any common sense, he would be sitting on the sidelines with Schmidt eating snow cones with the girls, but Sam is definitely joining in, so it's not like he has any choice. _It’s just out to the buoy and back. Cake walk,_ Nick tries to convince himself. He just has to beat Sam so Jess can see he isn’t a total loser. 

\---

If this had been a movie, the music would have swelled while Nick The Underdog coasted to a miraculous victory against Lifeguard Sam with some amazing hidden swimming talent he didn’t know he had. But this isn’t a movie, or if it is, it's a Greek tragedy, so Nick nearly drowns himself making it back to shore. He comes in dead last, while Sam barely breaks a sweat coming in first. _Perfect._ That's about the long and short of his life.

\---

Nick is lying flat on his back on his beach towel, wet, miserable, and still trying to catch his breath. Schmidt comes over and sits down next to him. 

“Well…that was terrible, Nicholas. I think I might actually die from a case of second-hand embarrassment.”

“Gee, thanks,” Nick says sarcastically with his eyes closed. He opens his eyes to glare at Schmidt. “You’re supposed to be on my side, Schmidt.”

“I am on your side, Nick. I’m always on your side.” 

“You were the one that said to put myself out there!” 

“Well, if I knew it was going to look like that, I probably would have told you to reconsider," Schmidt says jokingly. "Why’d you even want to do that anyway? I gotta tell you it was a lot nicer in the shade watching those Neanderthals trying to fight each other in a dumb contest than actually being a part of it.”

“I was trying to impress a girl,” Nick mumbles. It sounds ultra-lame when he says it out loud.

“Who? Cece? I call dibs, man. You barely said two words to her all day.”

“You can have her. I wanted to impress Jess.”

Schmidt looks across the beach. “Which one is she again?”

“Her friend in the red bikini. Brown hair. Killer blue eyes.”

“Oh, nerdy book girl." Schmidt considers her. "Yeah, I kind of see why you would be into her....And you thought showing off in something you have virtually no talent in would impress her? Bold strategy.”

Nick shrugs. “I just didn’t want that doucheface Sam to have her. But he won. Guys like him always win.” 

“Nick—" Schmidt pulls on his arm. "Can you sit up for a minute? I feel like I'm talking to Winston's cat.” 

Nick does so begrudgingly and Schmidt does that weird thing where he places both hands on either side of his shoulders so he can “drop some knowledge.” It’s extra-weird because Schmidt is a year younger than him, but he knows Schmidt only does it when he really wants Nick to pay attention to something. 

“You don’t have to be like Sam, Nick. You just have to be you. Forget Sam and all those other guys. You like her, go get her. If you do that and she still doesn’t want you, then you know she’s not the one for you, and you know you can let her go.”

Nick shrugs Schmidt off because it’s kind of embarrassing for Schmidt to do this in public in front of a couple dozen other people. even though it's kind of exactly what Nick needed to hear right now. Schmidt has an insufferable ego most of the time, but even Nick has to admit that when Schmidt's right, he's right.

Nick looks over at Jess across the beach surrounded by all those other people and hopes for her.


	6. All In

When Sam is distracted by a game of beach volleyball, Nick asks Jess to go walking under the boardwalk with him, taking his chance. 

\---

He’s walking next to Jess under the boardwalk. She’s not as chatty now, seemingly content to just walk next to him like this in relative silence. She’s humming a familiar tune he can’t quite place. It makes him nostalgic for things that have never happened, places he has never been. He wishes he were brave enough to hold her hand again, but all he can think about is everything he doesn’t know about girls.

With Caroline, it had been kind of easy since she was in control of everything. She was the one that kissed him first. She was the one that told him where they should go on their first date. She was the one that told him they were boyfriend and girlfriend. And in the end, she was the one that told him they weren’t anymore. He thought that was what love was, someone caring about you like that, someone knowing more about what you should want than you did and making that choice for you. 

But here he is now with Jess and the world is open before him. The weight of the choice to make Jess _his_ rests upon him, no one else, only him. How would it be if he could actually call Jess his girlfriend? He doesn’t know, but there is something exhilarating about being able to make that choice, even at the same time the possibility of her rejection terrifies him. 

\--- 

They stop to look out at the water, at the rising tide lapping at the beach under the pier. It’s almost like being on a different planet under the boardwalk. The sand and the surf mutes everything else out. The ocean comes in and washes the beach clean, erases the footsteps of where they had come from, where they had been. Maybe this day will be like that, a cosmic blip neither of them will even remember a year from now, even if he wants it to be different. 

“You didn’t have to come with me, Jess. You could have stayed with Sam and everyone else.” He looks down at his feet, draws shapes with his toes in the sand.

She gives him an encouraging smile from her place leaning against the pier. “You asked me to. I wanted to because you asked me to.”

Jess is a nice person and maybe it’s just a nice thing to say that ultimately has no deeper meaning behind it, but he feels that dangerous hope rise within him again. He turns so he can look directly at her. He tries to commit her to memory. _Her standing on the beach next to him in her red polka-dot bikini. Her windswept hair. The warm glow of the sun upon her skin. Those blue, blue eyes in which for a brief shining moment, he thought he saw his entire future reflected back at him._

Neither of them has said anything in a while. They’re sharing a silence, but it isn’t awkward. It feels like it did the first time he met her, comfortable like they’ve known each other for a long time. He wants to tell her how he feels, but all the words are jumbled up in his brain. He looks over at her and thinks, _God, I want to kiss her._ If he could only kiss her, he knows he would be able to find the words. He’s more certain of that than of anything he’s ever believed his entire life. 

If he chickens out, he knows Sam is going to kiss her, and he’ll lose her to Sam for good. He won’t get another chance to change her mind. He knows he’s not as good as Sam, probably never will be, but he thinks he’d try harder for her than Sam, that he’d be a better boyfriend to her if she lets him be, if he ever gets that far with her. 

They’re standing close together, and her hand grazes his. Maybe it was just an accident, but it gives him the courage he needs to lean in and press his mouth to hers. 

\---

Nick catches her off guard. Jess is grateful to be leaning against one of the wood pillars for support because she feels like she might melt into a puddle without it. She had just been daydreaming about maybe, possibly holding his hand again, but it had felt impossibly forward for her to do that even just a few short seconds ago. She didn’t think she was having her first kiss today when she left home. She had often fantasized about being at the center of her own great love story, but that’s what it had always felt like—a fantasy. She never thought that it would actually happen to her. It had felt like a completely far-fetched idea that anybody would ever want to kiss her, that anybody would even look at her or think about her in that way at all, but now she knows what it feels like to kiss somebody who really wants to kiss her back, and it’s better than any of those fantasies would have been because it’s real. Imperfectly perfect and real.

He kisses her hard, and it’s unexpectedly intense. He pulls her closer to him and her hands settle on the smooth skin of his back. His hands go up to cup her face. He pulls back slightly from her to catch his breath before he goes in to kiss her again gently two more times. The first intense kiss is him telling her he’s interested in her in that way guys are that’s about chemistry and physical attraction, but the other soft kisses afterwards are him telling her that he likes her in a pure and vulnerable way that most guys are afraid to. And Nick might look like an ordinary guy, but he kisses her like someone who’s already in love with her, and now she understands what was in his eyes the first time he met her. She knows that love at first sight shouldn’t exist in the real world, but she doesn’t know what else you would call that look—that was him falling in love with her the very first time he looked into her eyes. 

Nick puts his entire self into kissing her because he’s only sixteen, and he doesn’t yet have the words to tell her why she should pick him over anyone else. He just knows that he had found something he had been looking for his entire life despite his youth, something that might not come again if he lets her go.

\---

Their foreheads are pressed closed together afterwards, and they’re both breathing hard. Nick is looking into her eyes. His hand is still on her face, his thumb stroking her cheek tenderly. “I like you, Jess,” he whispers to her.

She was already left quite speechless by that kiss, but hearing him say that to her out loud renders her even more so. No guy ever likes her first if other girls are around and here Nick is giving her a little piece of his heart. 

But before she can respond back, she feels herself being pulled away from him. 

Sam holds her arm possessively. “No fair hogging Jess, Miller! Come play beach volleyball with us, Jess.” 

Nick looks after Jess defeated as Sam takes her away. He knows he can’t win them all, but he really, really wanted to win just this one time. It’s the first time in his life he had ever done something really brave. He put himself way out there and the universe shot him down. He never does things like this. He’s not some smooth, handsome, popular guy like Sam. He knows he’s nothing special. He had looked at Jess and thought maybe he could be for her. 

But he’s only ordinary, just ordinary, once again. 


	7. How You Get the Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know you're a huge Taylor Swift fan, Am, so of course, this last chapter's title pays tribute to that. :) 
> 
> Song Link: <https://youtu.be/QAr8bbgRiNg>

Nick is just killing time leaning on Schmidt’s car. He really didn’t want to stick around on the beach afterwards pretending he was fine and watching Sam and Jess being all happy and couple-y together. He thought he knew what heartbreak felt like after Caroline dumped him, but this feels even worse than that for some reason. He just met Jess today. He can’t be in love with her after only one day. He always thought those kinds of love stories were bogus, but he kind of was. He knew it was really important to get her to change her mind about him, felt it deep down inside himself, but he had failed. He has the feeling that he’ll still think about her years from now and wonder how she’s doing and how his life would have been if he had been allowed to keep her, if she had stayed in his life. 

\---

Schmidt finally makes it back to the car. He looks happy and serene after a day at the beach. Nick doesn't want to say anything to Schmidt to ruin Schmidt's good mood because at least one of them should be happy, but Schmidt takes one look at Nick and pulls him into a hug anyway. Nick usually isn’t a big fan of hugs, but he can’t lie and say it doesn’t help. 

“It’s fine, man. It is what it is,” Nick mumbles into him. 

Schmidt gets into the driver’s side. Nick lingers a bit longer outside the car to look out at the sunset over the water and breathe in the salty ocean air. _It could have been perfect._ He is just about to get into the passenger side when he hears his name faintly from across the beach. He looks up and sees a red dot come barreling down a sand dune towards him. He catches her in his arms. Her words all come out in one big breathless rush. She’s upset about something, but he can’t understand her. She finally manages to catch her breath enough so he can make out her words.

“I almost missed you,” she says tearfully. “We didn’t get to say goodbye and I thought you left and I would never be able to find you again.”

“I have a feeling you would always be able to find me, Jess,” he says half-jokingly, half-seriously. He swallows the lump of feelings in his throat. “And it’s okay, you know, if you don’t feel the same way back about me or anything—" 

She cuts him off with a kiss, short and sweet against his mouth. “I like you too. You didn't give me a chance to say it back to you.” If he can be brave, she can be too. "You don’t think much of yourself, Nick Miller, but I think you’re pretty incredible."

This revelation remains bittersweet when they both still have to leave in the next few minutes. 

“Where can this go, Jess?” he asks her anxiously. They practically live on opposite sides of the country from each other.

“I believe in us, Nick. We can’t be together now, but we’ll meet again someday.”

Schmidt, who has been pretending he hasn’t been eavesdropping this whole time, helpfully hands him a pen out of the driver side window like the good wingman he is. Jess scrawls her phone number on his arm. 

“You have to promise to call me when you get back to Chicago.”

He cups her face and kisses her again. “I promise. I believe in us too.” 

\---

Nick watches Jess jumping up and down and waving goodbye to him until she fades from view in the passenger side mirror. Afterwards, Nick traces the digits on his arm, committing her number to memory.

“Guess you’re over Caroline then?” Schmidt teases.

“Schmidt, I’m going to marry that girl,” Nick says earnestly.

Schmidt laughs at that. “Dibs on best man then. I told you we should have come to the beach today.”

Nick closes his eyes, picturing Jess in his head and their whole future together when they can finally meet again. “You were right. The beach was great. Perfect beach weather.” 


End file.
